Tag Archives: Miami Vice

Today I spent a couple of hours converting a wav-sample of Jan Hammer’s snare drum to my Drumtraks.
Download it here VICE-SNARE.ZIP, and read more about it below (this is the readme.txt included in the zip).

BACKGROUND STORY
This is the legendary snare that Jan Hammer used on several Miami Vice tunes like the Main Theme, Chase, Last Flight, Tubbs and Valerie, to name a few…

I’ve heard rumours that Jan himself sampled a real snare and put it in his Linn LM-2.

A couple of years ago I found a file called VICE-SNARE.WAV in a Miami Vice forum some years ago and saved it on my hard drive. This wav is a heavily reverberated recording, probably from the output of a Linn LM-2. Getting the original EPROM data would be a dream come true, but this will have to do!

TECHNICAL INFO
These are the steps I’ve performed:

1) Resampled the file to 24 000 Hz, which is the normal sample rate
2) Cut away the first 4096 samples, because this is the length that the snare has in the Linn LM-2 and SCI Drumtraks. I discovered that this is just the length needed, the rest is the reverb tail.
3) Converted the wav to the special audio format that these drum machines used using WAV2DMX from Electrongate
4) Saved the final result to a bin file. This can be burnt to a 2732 EPROM if you have a Linn LM-2. For the convenience of the Drumtraks users, I also joined it with the Linn LM-1 rim (downloaded from Electrongate) that can be burnt to a 2764 EPROM. On the Drumtraks, the snare and rim shares the same EPROM.

TIPS
The sample has a very abrupt end, and this is probably how it originally was. Jan used reverb, like most engineers did at that time, to mask this. If you listen to the recordings, you can hear that there’s a lot of reverb on every one of them.
Another thing that is important is the tuning. Both the LM-2 and the Drumtraks allows tuning, and you can hear on Jan’s recordings that the tuning varies from song to song.

FILES
VICE-SNARE.WAV – the original file found on the Miami Vice forum. This is probably sampled from his drum machine (Linn LM-2) and fed in to a reverb unit.
VICE-SNARE cut.WAV – this is what’s left of the above file, the first 4096 samples.
VICE-SNARE.BIN – the above file converted to the drum machine format. This should be used if you have an LM-2.
VICE-SNARE_LM1-RIM.BIN – the above file joined with the rim sound of the LM-1 (this is not sampled, it’s the original binary data). This should be used if you have a Drumtraks
VICE-SNARE demo.mp3 – short demo tune recorded from my Drumtraks. First a beat with a reverberated snare. Then all the possible tunings of the snare are demonstrated.

Credits to Jan Hammer for creating it in the first place.
Credits to the guy who uploaded the